


one missing body: my own

by relic_amaranth



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Slight dissociation (sort of?), body issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28509747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relic_amaranth/pseuds/relic_amaranth
Summary: Bucky finds his arm in England, his feet in Thailand, his tongue in Romania, and his heart in Brooklyn.ORBucky does “Eat, Pray, Love” his own way.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	one missing body: my own

**Author's Note:**

> This is a relatively short thing for how long it took me to write. Oh well. It’s one of those things where I had to realize it wasn’t going to be as good as it was in my head, but it still turned out better than my resignation allowed for. I’m glad I got it out and I like re-reading it, and that’s enough for me. And because I constantly forget to do this: this is MCU set after CA:TWS and ignores everything past that. (Except for one thing I partially stole from CA:CW. Partially.)

He rattles as he pulls i- no, the _train_ rattles. Or maybe it’s the station. He is unsteady on his feet but it feels familiar. Loud sounds crash in his ears while the ground falls– pulses– underfoot– no footing–

“-ate; are you all right?”

He blinks. The station is quiet again. Nothing shakes, and he unclenches his fist. One of the rowdy drunks from the other end stands in front of him, only sober enough to squint in concern, face still flush and breath coming out in heavy sour waves. He– _Bucky, he doesn’t want to admit it but he likes it–_ could kill the man in an instant. It would take maybe half a minute to take care of the other three, a minute for the station agent and businessman, and then maybe two more to get all the cameras.

He has a memory that blurs into another, two men, fifty years apart in time, each handing him a gun and telling him to do what needs to be done. Or maybe he is the gun being handed over. He is made of metal, after all. Bolt. Chamber. Sights. Muzzle. And trigger. That’s all that matters. All that–

“I’m fine,” he says, voice low. It doesn’t sound like his, doesn’t sound like it comes out of him, but he feels it in the back of his head and the base of his throat. “Thank you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, all right,” the man says, hesitating. He looks around and then…holds out a small card. Nonverbal command words don’t work on him, not anymore. And the embossed letters and pen-scratched numbers are unfamiliar. Bucky stares at it and the man leans in and whispers too loud. “I don’t know how long you’re here for but he helped my mate and he wouldn’t care where you’re from. All the same hell, right?”

“Right,” Bucky lies, because he has lived through many hells and all of them have been very different. But he takes the card (left hand, gloved, unnoticeable and unmemorable and he moves it but is it really _his_?) and puts it in his pocket. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” the man says and goes back to his friends.

Bucky looks down and stares at his hand for a moment. His fingers flex, independent of his own thoughts, and the ground seems to move under him.

He looks around for somewhere to sit but the closest bench has the businessman on it. It will have to do. He strides over, forcing his movements to be slow and light ( _heavy, purposeful, meant to terrify and stop_ but not now, not now). The station agent gives him a friendly smile and watches him until he sits. The business man scoots aside but nods in respect and goes back to reading his paper with tired, unfocused eyes. The businessman is not afraid. None of them are afraid.

He puts his hands in his lap, stares down at his gloved fingers and flexes them. Both sets move the same, in response to his commands. They curl, and flex, and even ripple up and down, one after the other.

He is the light bulb that flickers nearby, here but not fully, conspicuous but ignored; in and out and off and on. The weight of weapons sit like ghosts in his palms. Experimentally he mimes a finger on the trigger in his left hand, and holds an invisible knife in his right. But he stays the imaginary execution on both counts and allows his hands to fall open, fingers slack. Inactive.

How does a light bulb hold a gun, anyway?

He is in Thailand now, stuck in a resort area near tourists up too late and waiting for the small hours of the morning when he can slip away unnoticed. The sand is cool under his bare foot and because his other boot isn’t broken it makes him feel even lighter on that side. Uneven.

He frowns and shucks the other shoe, tossing it on top of his bloodied, ripped jacket. It’s a shame– he liked that jacket. And the shoes. The cold sand is interesting though; it rolls over his feet like tiny little beach balls. Beach balls? Beach balls. The term is familiar but it holds no meaning for him. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to.

Grains of sand shift and slide everywhere as he moves his feet under and through. Earlier in the day there had been a child who had jammed his small, flat feet in the sand and proclaimed himself “stuck,” theatrically pulling at his legs until his friends ran over and mimed pulling him out.

But the granules slide over skin, sticking to nothing. He is not stuck. His feet are rooted to nothing, held by nothing. One lifts, his toes curl, and he slams it down, making tiny brown beach balls scatter. And then he lifts it again.

He can set it wherever he wants.

For now, he stretches his leg out, leans back against his arms, and waits.

Sound is generally unpleasant. Everything is loud and the focus he once had that allowed him to pick out piecemeal conversations seems to be gone right now, or else scattered amongst his shattered mind like everything else he’s supposed to be.

Lahore is not much different from other cities when it comes to sound, but he’s found some respite in a park. The noise spreads out and the talking is so distant he doesn’t feel compelled to follow the threads. It’s all nothingness in the background; birds and people and cars somewhere beyond.

Laughter– loud, nearby– makes him flinch so hard the seat of the bench begins to give in his grip. It’s a man and he’s still laughing, so loud that it’s all Bucky can hear, except that it isn’t; there’s a laugh in his head that sounds just like it and that is all he hears, that laugh, the faintest pressure of a thin arm wrapped around him as they stumble out onto the still-wet street together and quickly uncouple but stay close, so close…

He blinks and loses the image of scattered cars, the faint whiff of fresh rain and road, and stares out at grass and a young father running after three children with a baby in his arms, all of them shrieking and laughing as he continues to laugh and chase after them.

Bucky is shaking, nauseated by the jolt of past to present and the hole in between, but he shuts his eyes and loosens his grip on the wooden seat and listens to the family’s laughter until it becomes something else. Something new.

After that, the noisy road becomes a background thrum and the birds don’t seem so bad. And even when they are, he can find that special laugh in the back of his mind and he pulls on that bell even though it makes him want to shake because they have taken so much from him but somehow they didn’t take that, and things are starting, _starting_ , to make sense.

“Are you going to buy?”

The man’s tone is rough, suspicious, and makes Bucky shrink back. It reminds him of orders in a variety of voices, an assortment of languages, but the derision always, always–

He leaves the store, allows his feet, legs, to carry him away. He always tries to supervise his body closely, especially when it does this. He watches for unconscious memory, ready to intervene in case it takes him down a familiar trail. Thankfully there is no prescribed path, no recognizable tread; only wandering through people while the noise they make buzzes around him and fills the air with static.

He finds himself in marketplace that is unfamiliar on the surface but familiar in a way that lets him breathe. He skulks through the crowd, hunched, “preoccupied,” hiding in a way he can deny. He knows how to do this, knows how…to…

He doesn’t know why he stops, but he stares at the fruit on display. There are people here but the crowd is less, and the two women behind the stall are busy with other customers. Maybe friends, by the way they converse, but he doesn’t care.

He stares at nothing and pretends to be seriously considering some oranges. He licks his lips and thinks of…snow. Before he can pull away from that thought, he realizes it isn’t the same. Small limp flakes falling from the sky into scattered piles of dirty white sludge. Small candles in a cold room curled up under blankets with one other body, almost as cold as the air, trying to provide heat.

“ _Steve_ ,” the name comes, murmured, lips tongue and teeth conspiring and committing the name into thin air. It closes his throat and opens his chest and he breathes, watches it all waft away in the cold.

When the young woman eventually comes over to check on him he says “please” and “how much” and “thank you” with a voice that feels shaky and new and old and smooth and wrong and right and his.

He sees it in sepia, in his mind’s eye, and sees it in much less color in front of him. It’s an old block building in a surprisingly quiet Russian neighborhood, drab and lifeless for all the color it has taken from him. Bucky sucks in a breath, spits out a curse and hits seven buzzers in quick succession.

The door unlocks. Bucky doesn’t yet move to go in. He looks around, eyes skimming past cracked paint, past the paved lot with scattered dead vegetation, past the street in disrepair and buildings and empty spaces that go on and on into the night poorly lit with barely functioning streetlights. He searches past them, staring into the distance, looking for somewhere far away from here.

He rests his left hand on the handle, hesitates, then slams the door open so hard it embeds itself into the wall behind it. He strides into darkness too deep to see anything, and he is grateful for it as images flash in front of him regardless of the time of day, or year, or decade. In darkness there was screaming, enclosure, pain. In darkness there were brushed lips, whispers that felt warm against his ear, a small body he did his best to warm and be warmed by.

Secrets, all of it, but he knows what he prefers as he knocks open a blocked passage and descends a narrow set of stairs into his own personal hell.

He finds his fingernails when his hand grips a wall during a tight turn and they grind uncomfortably against the stone; his eyelashes when snow falls and tries (and fails) to settle there; his sense of humor when a guard sees the bloodied bodies of his colleagues beside the still-breathing body of the man who put them there and throws himself off the side of the building.

(He finds a sense of shame at that. Just a little one.)

He finds his smile in China when a young woman catches his pen before it hits the floor and hands it back to him; his sense of smell when his nose crinkles in a smoke-filled building in Japan; the stinging annoyance of a paper cut in New Jersey.

He loses his breath while sitting on a bench in a familiar-unfamiliar-unknown park in New York. He finds a way to stumble forward on legs that do not want to move on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn. He re-discovers fear on a stoop at 0214.  
  


* * *

  
Some days Steve Rogers feels like Iron Man– not Tony Stark, the genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist, but like the suit that said man puts on when the heavy lifting needs done. It’s those times he forgets himself, forgets that he isn’t what he was and there’s no going back to it. It shows uncomfortably well in how many alarm clocks he’s had to buy. His friends think he’s really grumpy when he first wakes up. He doesn’t correct them– it’s less embarrassing than to admit that he doesn’t know how to gently push a button when the alarm is dragging him out of another nightmare. That he still expects to struggle to get his massive comforter off of him. That he’s watched inhaler commercials with great interest because maybe he should– except, no, he shouldn’t, because he doesn’t have to, won’t ever have to, not anymore.

It’s not all bad. Before this body he used to think he could catch a fist, only to have his own bony knuckles slammed back into his face, but just last week he caught a grenade and threw it so high in the air it didn’t hurt anyone. A pencil moves through his fingers now as easily as it did in 1939. His face is still recognizable enough; so recognizable that Bucky could know it just as much as he did then, his own face twisting into panic and fear and–

Steve throws his arm over his eyes and lets it rest, heavy, while he breathes in and out and in and out. His brain is still too loud. That’s something he wouldn’t have minded changing. He puts his hand down at his side and sighs, wondering if it would be better if he was just the brainless muscle a surprising amount people think he is. The way they sneer isn’t so different, talking about how they can see where the Hulk came from when they think he can’t hear them, different at least in their secrecy from the bullies who looked down at his breathless body and joked about how Davenport had the right of it–

Something isn’t right. Steve blinks and sits up, stilling himself and listening carefully. The window is shut but Steve can hear the single scuff of a shoe against pavement right outside and then…nothing. The curtain is open just a slit, allowing a thin line of streetlight and Steve creeps along the floor, the single eye that can fit that field of vision flitting around, scouting wherever he can, until he decides he’s clear enough and leans up so he can look down at the street.

Steve freezes. There’s a man in front of his building, fidgeting but otherwise doing nothing but staring at the door with his hands buried in deep pockets, no hat to hide that dark hair, and no sense of shame or impropriety when he lifts his head and steely eyes pierce right into Steve’s soul.

Steve hesitates, not wanting to leave his window for fear of losing sight of him– if he could figure how to leap out in a way that wouldn’t potentially scare Bucky he would deal with every noise complaint thrown at him. But Bucky is here, Bucky can see him, Bucky is…still there. Steve mouths ‘wait’ in a vain hope but Bucky _nods_ and that’s all he needs to scramble to his feet and run out of the room, down the stairs, almost breaking the banister when he uses it to swing a turn to the front of the house and he’s still moving even as he rips the door open and skids to a stop right in front of…

“You stayed,” he breathes.

“You asked,” the other man says, his voice rough. He winces and shrugs one shoulder. “Sort of.”

“Are you…”

“I don’t know.”

Steve frowns. “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”

Bucky snorts. “I got two guesses. And either way…” Bucky opens his arms as if presenting himself. Steve stares at his face, doesn’t look away at anything, not at Bucky’s chest, pockets, belt, not even at the left arm as it falls to his side.

“Do you want to…come in?” Steve asks, unable to keep the twinge of hope out of his voice.

Bucky hesitates for a moment, stares at the ground under his shoe for several seconds, and then takes a step forward.

Steve finds deep sleep for the first time in a long time. Bucky finds dreams in a large bed with a firm mattress. They both find peace and comfort as they each curl around a body that is not their own.


End file.
